The dominance hierarchy aspect arose at the same time that men began having social and sexual control of women and verified paternity becomes important for the first time. That's why it's a patriarchal dominance hierarchy. In a small communal band where everyone shares and takes care of each other with no real possessions, it doesn't matter who the father of a child is.
The social stratification applied not only to gender but to things like wealth, class, race, sexuality, etc. In other words, patriarchy is a male-dominated dominance hierarchy. Feminists don't tend to go into that part but I'm a social scientist and I think it's an important part of the equation that we need to talk about because it shows that patriarchy didn't arise as a way for men to abuse women - it arose as a larger social dynamic of coercion and control via new social stratifications that had not previously existed in egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups or even some early cities.
In general, the agricultural revolution and the accompanying population explosion is blamed, but that's kind of an oversimplification. Here's some more about that from a story I published a while back based on the book The Dawn of Everything - which is a fascinating and thoroughly researched look at how much personal autonomy was practiced and valued even where some centralized hierarchy existed. Highly recommend if that topic interests you although it is quite long.
But, as I’m finding out, there are also innumerable other examples of settlements, cities, and even kingdoms from around the world where there was little to no top-down hierarchy or centralized political administration. From 300-hectare settlements in China’s Shandong Province that predate the earliest royal dynasties by 1000 years, to enormous ceremonial centers of the Maya which also predate the rise of the kings by 1000 years, we have evidence of many large communities with no evidence of central government or top-down hierarchy. Although Bali is a notably densely populated island historically governed by a series of kingdoms supported by wet-rice production, the management of that was overseen by a complex system of consensual decision-making by the farmers themselves — not the kings. These are only a few examples and there are many more.
Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself. It does, however, allow people to make their own day-to-day and moment-to-moment decisions about their own activities, as long as they do not violate the band’s implicit and explicit rules. For example, individual hunter-gatherers are free, on any day, to join a hunting or gathering party or to stay at camp and rest, depending on their own preference. (source)
What this same sort of freedom looked like pre-patriarchy certainly differed in specifics from culture to culture and from era to era. In some cultures, it even shifted with the seasons, where the structures of winter villages stood in steep contrast with the greater freedoms of the rest of the year. Times of congregation were often the season for rituals, and temporary kings or ritual police who did have actually coercive power might be appointed for those events. There’s actually a fair amount of evidence that later secular sovereigns and hierarchy may well have emerged out of dynamics established during religious observance, but that’s a whole other story in itself.
According to The Dawn of Everything, there are, however, three main components of historical autonomy:
The freedom to leave one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands;
The freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; and
The freedom to disobey authorities without consequence
This too could, and probably will be, the topic of a future story, but we do see these elements, which are all characterized by opportunities for change at will, as central elements of human life that were a given in the pre-patriarchal past. For most of human history, people not only wanted but managed to have great say over their own lives in a wide variety of ways, and under many divergent systems until the rise of coercive dominance hierarchies when people became more at the mercy of those above them — something that goes back only a few thousand years.
The purpose of this piece is not to say that we can easily return to that place of personal autonomy mixed with social interdependence that our ancestors so often enjoyed, but I do think it is still important to recognize how much of a core human value it does seem to be. It’s easy to fall into the supposition that the world has always been much like it is now, just without modern conveniences but there’s just too much evidence to the contrary.
As stated above, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, they make up most of human existence. When the indigenous population of North America met the French, they saw the Europeans as little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their so-called superiors. Jesuit missionaries were simultaneously outraged that native women were considered to be in control of their own bodies and could have sex before marriage and divorce at will with no stigma. Not all pre-patriarchal cultures had the exact same mores or structures, but they do seem to have all valued autonomy in a way that was foreign to dominance-based cultures.
We can’t recreate the past, but we can take some of the best aspects of it and think about how they might inform the present and the future. And, as a student of history, I want to learn about what really happened, not just how it was fed to me in school, which was invariably Eurocentric, patriarchal, and simplistic. Reading this book has taught me a lot of new things, and rounded out my understanding of others. What really stands out most for me in reading it is how deeply we humans value personal autonomy. In fact, when patriarchy did arise, it spread because it was so disruptive. “In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural — or physical — extinction of egalitarian societies.” New Scientist
In this context, egalitarian refers not only to Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, but also to a wide variety of larger and more developed cultures where individual autonomy was valued and fostered — including within settlements, cities, and kingdoms.
Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.
